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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2




On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 8:40 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

OK. I don't really understand why opaqueness is so clearly preferable
- but perhaps this is a matter of wisdom born from years of usage, which
I shouldn't expect to understand.

The need for opaque contexts was the main reason for "tu'a" to exist, so you could say "mi nitcu tu'a su'o mikce" without claiming that there's a doctor such that you need them.

Now at least sometimes, we seem forced into a kind reading of the iota;
e.g. if {tu'a}(x,y) means something like "x is an abstraction involving
y", then in {broda tu'a ko'a .e ko'e} we seem forced to a kind reading:
"abstractions involving ko'a and involving ko'e".

The usual expansion for "tu'a X" is actually "lo du'u X co'e" and so you would get "lo du'u ko'a .e ko'e co'e". So "tu'a(x,y)" doesn't really mean "x is an abstraction involving y" but "x is the (one and only) proposition that y satisfies the obvious-from-context predicate". Several issues with that, but maximality would presumably not be one of them. One complication is that sometimes "tu'a" is used to stand for other NUs, but even if it was just "du'u" this is not exactly a vanilla "lo broda be" as we were thinking for other LAhE, so maybe "tu'a" is something of an anomaly, like "fa'u" for the JOIs. 


Example where both readings are actually plausible:
    mi xebni na'e bo mi
could mean either "I hate everything other than me" or "I hate things
other than me".

The problem you're having doesn't seem to be specifically about "na'e bo", it will happen with any "lo broda", which could be "all the brodas" or just the generic/kind "brodas". 

So maybe {lo} == \iota == "the largest" isn't really right after all?

pc prefers "the most salient". I think how we describe it is mostly a matter of how much of the burden we want to put on this operator and how much on the determination of the universe of discourse.


> > So rather than representing {lo broda cu brode} as
> >     Presupposition: broda(c1)
> >     brode(c1)
> > could we then just represent it as
> >     brode(\iota broda(_))?
> >
> > That would make me happy.
>
> How would you express it in Lojban?

As {lo broda cu brode}!

\iota x. P(x)  <->  lo poi'i P
is what I was hoping for.

OK, so "lo" is primitive and you need to introduce "poi'i" to deal with the mechanics. I don't have a problem with that presentation.

> (Hopefully nothing involving mekso. :)

{li mo'e lo nu'a na'u broda} does have a certain ring to it, now you
mention it...

That's perfect.

mu'o mi'e xorxes
 

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